Serge Barbeau

Galería Hilario Galguera presents Lost and found by Serge Barbeau at the Central Patio of the Hotel Mondrian / Hotel Andaz. During Art Week, there will be extended hours Tuesday through Sunday from 11:00 am to 5:00 pm.

There is a hidden ceremony behind every ceremony. Intimate rites charged with metaphor and alchemy.

Photography, in its aesthetic essence, celebrates them from the communion between the photographer, the image and the one who is portrayed. And when this consecration happens... the miracle of art takes place. Serge Barbeau, in Lost and Found, presents us today with his own ceremony - as captivating as it is honest - that navigates the waters of astonishment and mystery. Here, the photographer introduces us to it, walking through the cracks of different rites. In this exhibition, Barbeau -an essential artist in the fashion photography of the 80s and 90s- opens a parenthesis in his work with the big fashion magazines to offer the most intimate and deepest trace of his career: erotic photography. It is his deepest homage to art, sewn with the same thread as imagination. There is no eroticism, not art that does not wear the cloak of fantasy.

But Barbeau also offers us a second ritual dedicated to his work with the Polaroid camera. The Pola that, from its sovereign aura, catches the most audacious of glances, of crimsons and silences. The Pola that carries in itself something sacred in the immediacy of the image and in the intimacy it provokes between the model and the photographer. The Polaroid that, in analog times, the photographer used as a spontaneous tool to see, correct and shoot (in the absence of the digital screen to advance an end), today raises a precise standard, as a result and product itself. And it is thanks to her that Barbeau accesses the model, her nature. He shows her in an instant the first image, intervenes her, builds her and provokes the great moment where she, with confidence and security, merges with his lens. It is right there, where erotic photography and Polaroid meet in the same constellation of mystery, metaphor and art.

But there is no ceremony that is not invested by the halo of enigma or rite surprised by the lightning of this or that chance. And Lost and Found is no exception. The appearance of these Polas is as seductive as the essence of themselves. Each of these 14 pieces - taken during six months in Paris, in 1995 - remained secretly kept for 30 years in an attic in Canada. In a “little box”.

In 2023, Barbeau organized his archives for his Retrospective, 25 years of fashion photography: Paris, Milan, New York, opening in March 2024 and organized by the Museo de la Ciudad de Mérida -where he currently combines residence with the Francisco Uh May jungle-. In search of material, the photographer travels to his native Montreal where his accountant keeps some of his belongings. Going down to a basement, he found what he was looking for: more than 50 small boxes of color negatives. And from there, the astonishment again... one of the boxes was thicker. That joint project with the Laboratoire Picto in Paris - where the photographer printed his negatives every day - was being opened after three decades of silence and dust.

It was the box that today tells us about the power of art as ceremony. Of the power of eroticism as fantasy and metaphor. It was the Pola photos as part of the ritual that goes beyond (or beyond) reality and the mystery from which they were born. It was Lost and Found.

–Mariví Pascual